![]() Indeed, the pandemic has given people pause to think about “how they consume, what their relationship with stuff should look like and what is deeply valuable in their lives,” he says. “This is the best opportunity in the past 30 years to bring consumption back to the centre of the political discourse,” says MacKinnon, speaking from his home in Vancouver. ![]() But how feasible is it for all the world’s citizens to swap Amazon baskets for a simple agrarian life? More pointedly, do we want to? Does MacKinnon’s vision represent an enlightened Shangri-La – or a primitive dystopia? ![]() His is an impassioned call to arms, for the sake of our planet and our wellbeing. ‘When people buy less stuff, you get immediate drops in emissions, resource consumption and pollution.’ Photograph: Harriet Noble/Studio Pi “When people buy less stuff, you get immediate drops in emissions, resource consumption and pollution, unlike anything we’ve achieved with green technology.” That’s not to mention the impact materialism has on our mental health, inducing feelings of inadequacy and envy, and encouraging a culture of overworking. “Many people would like to see the world consume fewer resources, yet we constantly avoid the most obvious means of achieving that,” says MacKinnon. The US population is 60% larger than it was in 1970, but consumer spending is up 400% (adjusted for inflation) – and other rich nations, including the UK, aren’t much better. We are devouring the planet’s resources at a rate 1.7 times faster than it can regenerate. Consumption – of fast fashion, flights, Black Friday-discounted gadgets – has become the primary driver of ecological crisis. He sees this as an obvious, if difficult, fix to a big problem. The only thing fantastical about his vision is the timeframe: rather than ceasing all shopping overnight he thinks we should, in reality, restructure society over several years to support a sustained reduction in the amount we consume. “It would be a shock so great that it would seem to bend time itself,” MacKinnon writes. The global economy nosedives so severely it makes the 2008 recession seem like a blip. Shops shut, production lines grind to a halt and millions of factory workers lose their jobs. On the hypothetical day the world stops shopping, carbon emissions plummet the skies turn a deeper blue and with no ads polluting smartphone screens our minds become as clear as the bottle-free oceans in which whales swim merrily. His “thought experiment” plays out like a Ridley Scott sci-fi epic – or perhaps a scene from the pandemic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |